I approached the Elm City from the east along the shore hugging I-95. I had just spent a rare evening in Providence following a lengthy interview with a primary source. This was a much less travelled route for me as I usually visited my Alma Mater via New York City or Hartford. In a sense, then, the intensifying rain was reassuring.

It doesn’t always rain in New Haven, but girl you know it oughta. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it rained. Think all that rain might have put a damper on things? It rained so hard on Thursday my pants didn’t dry until Sunday. Fortunately, years of Boy Scout leader training did not go to waste. I had packed a spare pair.

I hadn’t planned on going to my 35th reunion by way of Rhode Island, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity when it presented itself. The additional one hour and forty four minutes of travel time seemed like a small cost. Because it came up at the last minute, however, I failed to account for other costs. For example, whenever I visit New Haven I try to Continue Reading “You Can’t Have Rainbows without a Little Rain”

The stories we choose to tell (and re-tell) not only reveal what we want others to see in us, but what we wish to see in ourselves. These vignettes, often relayed in brief summary, possess a certain magic. They hit upon the highlights, the “best of” reel of our real life. Their brevity, however, demands the tale be spun in a crisp black-and-white fashion rather than the nuanced shades-of-gray more suitable for the novel form. It’s how we select to reduce those ambiguous shades of gray to the stark black and white where we (and others) discover our true inner nature. Does it matter that these short-cuts skirt the definitive facts? Philosophers (and psychologists) may say truth lies more in perception than reality. That might be hard for a Group IV major like me to swallow, but, I must admit, it does make for a very compelling narrative.

“The Rink of Dreams” represents just one such tale. It captures both the myth and the actuality of The CTO, a group which simultaneously existed and didn’t exist. (There, now that sounds like someone trained in quantum physics.) This superposition of states applies to The CTO as much as it applies to Schrödinger’s cat, and for reasons even we (or anyone else) at the time didn’t realize.

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